Things For Doing Things

This is a story for Compufreak, but the rest of you can read along.

Hal fixing a light switch!

So there’s this army engineer, right. His job is to maintain the jeeps to make sure that they run fine, and he’s pretty good at his job. One day while he’s working on an engine, he notices a cracked head on an engine block. So, he has to pull the whole thing out to dismantle it and replace the head. Problem is, that engine is sitting where it is with kitbashed parts so he needs to get his hands on a set of socket wrenches that can open up the area and move the engine. Problem is, being the army, there aren’t socket wrenches just laying around – he’s got to do some horse trading, culminating with him trying to design a dentist’s drill in order to get parts for a valve in the dentist’s chair so he can trade them for a press that’ll let him get the socket wrenches out of the supply sergeant and you’ve all seen this joke in an Episode of M*A*S*H.

When my dad worked in the hospital as a chef, it wasn’t his first job. He started out curiously, in the army, as a cook. There, he learned things like making scrambled eggs in bulk out of powder, of turning a series of dusts into a series of meals. Then he worked in a restaurant where he had to learn how to fillet fish perfectly and cook steak for presentation. Then he worked in a hospital where he had to learn precise measurements for dietician’s specifications. And in that job… He sliced off his thumb.

Twice.

When my dad was healing up from having lost his thumb, though, you know he didn’t stop being a chef. He was still a chef, still employed at the hospital, still had all that knowledge, but part of his job, in order to do his job, was to heal up and become whole enough to do the work.

We somehow weirdly can see in the line of the engineer, that there is a comical but understandable connection between the actions, a cause and effect chain that results in ‘making a dentists drill helps fixing an engine block,’ and that’s naturally a part of being an engineer working with limited parts, but even though it’s part of another chain, ‘recover enough until you can work’ wasn’t seen as being part of being a chef.

This is true of game design as well.

Game design is the task of programming humans to pretend to care about something you then refuse to let them have. It is ridiculously challenging to do well. It requires empathy and practice and practice and practice and of course, practice. And part of that practice is getting your head right enough that you can make things, that you can test the question ‘is this interesting?’ or ‘is this fun?’ and have an answer that makes some coherent sense.

If you’re not creating, you don’t stop being a game designer. Time spent recovering and  playing games and relaxing and listening to podcasts and playing with plush dolls is time spent being a game designer because you are taking care of the instrument that you work with, your mind.

Be kind to yourself.